Jimmy Warren fights tears as he recalls his son Tim's gentle strength, talking Wednesday at home in Cleveland.

CLEVELAND, Miss. -- For most of his career, Jimmy Warren taught advanced biology at Cleveland High School -- 24 of his students in this town of 12,334 in the heart of the Mississippi Delta would go on to become doctors, he can proudly tell you.

But nothing in his vast knowledge and understanding of the process of life could help Warren fathom the series of events that led to the death his 39-year-old son, Memphis Police Department officer Tim Warren.

It defies explanation how his son came to die Sunday night in the stairwell of a hotel in Downtown Memphis, gunned down as it turned out by a man he did not know, also from Cleveland, who had drawn Tim and his comrades to the hotel with gunfire that killed another man.

That victim, too, was from Cleveland -- and named Arthur Warren. But, the father insists, of no blood relation, not even distantly.

Jimmy Warren, 70, also says he never met the parents of the shooter, both of whom work for the same school district that employed him.

"You could not write a script any stranger," he said Wednesday from his house in a mature, suburban-style neighborhood near Delta State University.

Retired now for 15 years, he is a well-known figure in this town, which has retained some vibrancy with a combination of industry (Baxter Healthcare, Faurecia Automotive), downtown retail, academia and Delta tourism. It is about two hours from Memphis down U.S. 61, more famously known as "Blues Highway" the world over.

A guard on the 1961 and '62 Ole Miss football teams and Cleveland football coach for almost a decade, Warren talks of the decision he made to forgo a career in coaching that would've meant uprooting his family.

Emotions rattle him when he describes the house where his son grew up, right near the high school and university, with kids congregating every day to play and ride bikes and enjoy whatever baked goods a friendly Italian neighbor had to offer.

Reported violent crime is rare -- the most recent available figures show only six murders from 2003 through 2009.

"Cleveland was the absolute perfect place to raise a family," Jimmy Warren says.

Tim grew up huge -- 6-foot-6, 270 pounds and sought by football recruiters -- but with a soft, generous heart. It was about the sixth grade, his father recalls, when Tim brought home a then-fashionable Fossil watch from one of their frequent weekend excursions to Memphis.

"Someone in his class said his family would never afford it, so Tim took it off his own wrist and gave it to the boy," Warren says.

Near the center of town, at Hankins Auto Body just off Hwy. 61, the colleagues who considered Arthur Warren family use words like "peaceful" and "quiet" and "devoted" to describe the 49-year-old mechanic and tow-truck operator.

Police say Arthur was killed by his ex-wife's new 22-year-old husband, Alexander Haydel, after an altercation at the DoubleTree Hotel at Third and Union. Reports indicate that Arthur had made the trip reluctantly, at the behest of his teenage daughters who wanted to spend time with him.

The auto-body shop is housed in an old metal Quonset hut on First Street. Arthur has a baby daughter, Skylar, who stays at a day care center nearby, and owner Ottis Hankins said that on most days, Arthur would drive over to visit the child.

"It's a great tragedy and everybody is talking about it and coming to me," said Hankins. "I don't know no more other than we got two dead men should never have been killed."

About four miles away, on rural Zumbro Road, Arthur Warren lived with his mother in a brick ranch house that bakes in the summer sun and faces soybean fields, with tall metal silos breaking up the vast flat landscape.

The house is flanked by a large "Gresham Petroleum" propane tank squatting on one side and a motor home on the other. It seems a world away from the neighborhoods that Tim Warren would come home to when visiting from Memphis. Arthur Warren's obituary on the Cleveland Funeral Home website reads: "When he wasn't working you would find him on the Sunflower River near Zumbro, his childhood home."

Arthur's mother, Ruth, provided a portrait for the local daily, The Bolivar Commercial, similar to the one from his body-shop colleagues.

He loved his daughters, he loved reading westerns and he wasn't much of a drinker.

Both men will be buried on Friday, Arthur at the rural Linn Methodist Church cemetery south of town and Tim in New Cleveland Cemetery not far from Delta State, next to his mother, who died in 1991 from cancer.

It will be the second funeral in four months for Jimmy Warren -- his daughter Dondi Jackson's husband, Greg, was killed in a four-wheeler accident in March in Mountain View, Ark.

Dondi drove back to Memphis on Wednesday morning, carrying family photos up that familiar highway connecting Cleveland to Memphis and so associated with the blues.